The first major departure from assembler into higher level languages came with the introduction of C offering a simpler approach to programming than was ever known before. The orignal Borland C interfaced with the very first windows operating system windows 286 which run on the 80286 pc. Both the windows platform and Borland C were considered state of the art systems in their day, and a radical departure from the previous CPM and MsDos systems. Programming for windows still did not have any of the features common today, software development kits were unheard of and the best solution at the time was the OWL library from Borland. Public release of Microsoft C was not anticipated.

As platforms became more stable the software development arena was dominated by Borland c and Borland c++. Databases were confined to DbaseII and clipper compiler and the arrival of Borland Paradox. Database programming was severely restricted and scalability was a sophisticated advance yet to come.

The arrival of Microsoft C eventually led to a significant dominance, with the most stable version to this day being VC6. C++ added that concept of true object orientated language concepts terminating in the current version of Managed C.